By BOB JOHNSON
[email protected]
HUMBOLDT — Confederate forces, mistaken for a band of whooping Indians, attacked Humboldt at dusk on Oct. 15, 1861.
Arnold Schofield, with booming voice and presence that commands attention, read a first-person appraisal of the subsequent ravaging of Humboldt here Wednesday evening.
Writers today don’t capture the flavor of what happened 150 years ago nearly as well as the stories recorded by those involved, said Schofield, supervisor of the Mine Creek Battlefield near Pleasanton. He then launched into an account written by Lt. John W. Fisher, a company commander of the Confederate force that rode into Humboldt at dusk on the fateful day.
Fisher’s commentary:
Before Humboldt’s burning, he and other Southern sympathizers heard the Missouri
governor, Clayton Fox Jackson, rail about his intention to burn Kansas from one end to the other. The two states had been at odds for several years, with battles between free-state and pro-slavery bands erupting as early as 1856, the start of the Bleeding Kansas period.
On Oct. 14 the mounted Confederate force arrived at Osage Mission, now St. Paul, and started for Humboldt at 10 the next morning.
Arriving at the edge of town at sunset, “We charged in, yelling like Indians,” Fisher wrote. And, “without firing a shot took the town completely by surprise.” Forty to 50 Humboldt men were taken prisoners and “three or four were killed.”
“We broke into all the houses, searching for men and taking whatever we wanted,” he wrote.
Humboldt then was set afire, with just two or three houses left for the women and children. Stores and mills were torched.
Fisher remembered Humboldt “as a pretty town, a lot like Paola,” where he had worked as a pharmacist before the war. “I hated to see it destroyed, but that’s what the governor sent us to do.”
In concession to civility, the raiders reportedly helped the Humboldt women move household goods and personal belongings to the town square before they went house to house with torch in hand.
By 9 o’clock that evening “Humboldt now was in ashes,” said Schofield, repeating the title of his presentation.
After the raid, the Union Army dispatched the Seventh and Second Kansas Cavalry to Humboldt and, “Humboldt rose again and became a prosperous town,” Schofield said.
By spring 1862, the Leavenworth Conservative reported, “Humboldt boasts of a dozen homes and several heaps of ashes, the result of the attack by Missouri and Arkansas ruffians. On a rise is a fortification that gives quarters to a motley department (the Union defenders).” On the corner of the garrison was a large buzz saw blade, which would have been struck to alert troops of a pending attack, and also three times a day for mess call.
An aside Schofield mentioned was that perhaps the first execution of a Union soldier in Kansas occurred in Humboldt.
Alexander Driskill was executed by a firing squad for stealing the Humboldt commander’s horse — “A big mistake,” said Schofield — in a failed desertion attempt. Driskill had a checkered past: He deserted a British unit, came to the United States and enlisted with the Confederates. He killed a fellow rebel in a knife fight and sought refuge in the 7th Kansas Cavalry, before his last, and fateful, desertion attempt at Humboldt.
SCHOFIELD set the scene for his commentary by noting that the frontier of the United States by the mid-1850s was western Missouri and eastern Kansas, an area of confrontation from the start of the Bleeding Kansas period in 1856 to end of the Civil War in 1865.
“It had a bit of civilization, but violence was an inherent way of life,” Schofield said, with free-state and pro-slavery advocates at each other’s throats. “The (Civil) war really started here in 1856.”
Kerry Altenbernd made the same contention last week in a presentation about John Brown at Allen County Community College. Altenbernd, curator of the Black Jack Battlefield near Baldwin, proposed the first battle of the war occurred there in 1856.
The only difference, Schofield said, was “90 percent of the violence was in Kansas before the Civil War started, and 90 percent was in Missouri afterward,” leading to the state being referred to as the “Land of Misery.”
Humboldt may have become a Confederate target, he noted, because it was relatively isolated, 50 miles southwest of the main eastern Kansas Union presence in Fort Scott.
The town was attacked a few weeks before its burning by two bands of marauders, one led by John Matthews and the other by Thomas Livingston. They came on Sept. 8, 1861, and burned part of the town. Both were tracked down and killed by Union forces.
THE PROGRAM was a function of the Allen County Historical Society with the help of Humboldt historians Eileen and Ellery Robertson. About 50 people attended.
